Reporting from Capitol Hill

Filmmaker Andrew Marcus has made a ten-minute video about yesterday’s Judiciary Committee hearings on the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program; it’s been posted at Pajamas Media. The video includes footage of Arlen Specter and Alberto Gonzales inside the hearing room, interviews with Senator John Cornyn and Debra Burlingame, some of the questions Paul asked Ted Kennedy and Dick Durbin, and Paul’s concluding summary of the hearings’ significance.
It’s an excellent recap of the first day’s proceedings, with some valuable perspective that is absent from most news accounts. One of the most telling moments is when Debra Burlingame points out that prior to the September 11 attacks, the NSA was surveilling an al Qaeda member in Yemen who placed or received more than a dozen phone calls to and from a number in San Diego. Because these calls involved someone in the United States, the NSA didn’t listen to them. It turned out that the “Kahlid” who was receiving the calls in San Diego was one of the September 11 hijackers. In fact, he was one of the hijackers who murdered Debra’s brother, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77.
This is what Democrats and the news media call “domestic spying.” Do the Democrats really want to return us to the days when al Qaeda could call its American operatives with impunity?